Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday August 11, 2011 @06:30PM
from the OK-but-it's-just-following-the-wall dept.

mikejuk writes "While Google makes headlines with its driverless car and even manages to lobby Nevada to legalize driverless cars on the public road — China quietly pushes ahead on its own. A driverless car navigated 286km of expressway all on its own. Using nothing but a pair of video cameras and laser rangefinders, i.e. no GPS, it managed to arrive safely even through fog. The computer vision based approach means that at the moment it can only drive during daylight hours. Google might need to speed up ..."

Automatically driving a car isn't easy per se, but it's not anywhere near the hardest AI problems we have. In particular, if we were to take a realistic bar for safety--- beating the average human driver--- the bar is actually pretty low, because the average safety record of human drivers is pretty shitty. A robot driver could just not speed and drive relatively defensively, and that alone would give it a big built-in accident-rate advantage, even if its raw skill was worse than a typical human driver.

I'm guessing that this is going to be like when Toyota was having problems with unexplained acceleration a while back. The matter took on a life of its own due to incompetence on Toyota's part in how they handled the programming.

They did ultimately get a clean bill of health on that aspect of it, but I don't think the problem was ever really solved. Which is different from break failure which is fundamentally a much easier to investigate problem.

The answer to that question is not rational, it has to do with how human beings react to things they don't really understand. Robots and AI definitely fall into that category, and seem particularly scary to many people.

Actually a lot of people are doing this as well. I bought a video black box for my car. It's a smallish radar detector like device that mounts behind my mirror. when I hit the brakes or if an impact is registered it write protects that file and the next recordings until it fills the device.. I have lots of entertaining video clips of idiot moves I have seen on my commute.

search amazon.com for accident recorder. better ones are 720P HD and will use MicroSDHC cards to record about 8 hours worth of video b

In particular, if we were to take a realistic bar for safety--- beating the average human driver--- the bar is actually pretty low,

You are approaching an intersection with a stopsign, and arrive at the same time as someone to your left. By the law, you have the right of way. However, the person to your left has started drifting forward.

Will the computer system catch that? Or what about when someone is attempting to merge and has indicated by glancing your way?

Its not as easy as youre making it, either, there are a lot of cues on the road that need to be followed so long as other falliable humans are on the road. A good deal of safe

This is one of the bigger limitations with human drivers. We can't simultaneously be looking where we're going and looking to see that we can safely change lanes. We have to settle for looking back and forth, which also gives momentary stretches where we aren't looking in either direction.

A robotic driver could be looking in both directions and as you suggest actually asking for permission. Presumably, that would allow the other drivers the chance to adjust slightly to allow for a safer lane change. Which t

How does it determine whether the other person is looking at you, waiting for you to go, with his foot off of the brake, or actually preparing to move before you?

I don't think it can -- we're a long way from a computer being able to read a driver's intentions from looking at his (distant) face behind a window.

On the other hand, I don't think it really has to. As long as its reaction times are quick enough that it can stop itself before the human's car and the automatic car collide, that will probably be sufficient to avoid accidents. (if perhaps not sufficient to avoid getting the finger from the human)

Now if robot cars become the norm it gets easier still. The computers can just talk to each other to say 'can I merge?'

If robot cars become the norm, we can get rid of 'traffic lights', stop signs, etc, and use a network protocol to determine which cars get to enter the intersection in which order, in order to optimize the aggregate cars-per-second rate of the road system.

Speed limits can also be determined by a safety algorithm, and we won't need traffic cops anymore, which will save government a

If robot cars become the norm, we can get rid of 'traffic lights', stop signs, etc, and use a network protocol to determine which cars get to enter the intersection in which order, in order to optimize the aggregate cars-per-second rate of the road system.

You won't be able to get rid of traffic lights (etc) until all manually-driven cars have been banned from public streets. Which will happen sometime between "when your great grandchildren are old", and "never".

And even then, there would still be pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, etc, to worry about. So I think traffic lights won't be going away anytime soon.

And even then, there would still be pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, etc, to worry about. So I think traffic lights won't be going away anytime soon.

Motorcycles will be robotic too. Bicycle riders will be required to be equipped with an electronic interface to the vehicle network. Their bike will identify them to the other vehicles as a rider and tell them when they can stop/go; or they just won't be allowed on the road.

Lack of traffic lights does not preclude the concept of walk/no walk s

Seems like the problems in the examples you give are based on humans being bad drivers and are the cause of accidents now. The last example you give also depends on the computer acting like a person in the first place. A computer would always assume the car in front could stop at any time and thus will always follow at a safe distance. There's no need to pump the brakes (slow down) because unlike a person, the computer won't be following too close to begin with.

Speaking of a social and political problem, AI assisted and/or taxied driving won't become mainstream. Not because of technology, but because of liability. So tell me, when one of these units is involved in the death of a fellow motorist or pedestrian, who's to blame? Who do you think the lawyers are going to go after? The group that has the most money, that's who.

There are tens of thousands of road related fatalities in the US every year and often times the number is similar to the total number of American servicemen that died during the Vietnam conflict. I'd say there's plenty of room for improvement.

What's worse is that those are deaths that didn't need to happen, rarely if ever are those deaths that genuinely couldn't be avoided. They tend to be things like drinking, distraction, falling asleep behind the wheel, running a red light etc.

On top of emotions, a lack of almost every other weakness of humans, in addition to emotions that vary our abilities widely, our skill also varies greatly on sleep, food, blood alcohol level, drugs, who's in the car. I'd have to say it is a miracle we make it to work every day.

The freeway itself should be able to know where every automobile is located on the freeway. Every car should have a Wi-Fi system so that it can broadcast its speed and location to every car within a half of a mile of its location. Every car would be on cruise control so that if the car was in a particular lane its speed would be a certain speed in order to maintain a safe separation distance. Turning on one's turn signal would control the speed of the cars in the desired lane so that one could safely get

Since you get more injured if you were going faster before the crash, the robot driver would still have to go at a safe speed. Even it you are paying attention you can crash - something in thecar breaks and makes it uncontrollable, someone else hits you etc.

I've heard that in China, sometimes richer people drive cars while poorer people ride bicycles. If a car hits a bike rider, the bike rider can sue for damages. Thus, it can be advantageous, and it's allegedly common, for a car driver to accidentally hit a biker, back up, and run him over again to finish him off. I wonder if and when some company (maybe Google, maybe not) will have cars that do this.

I've heard of this sort of thing happening in Taiwan, but specifically with truck drivers. For whatever reason they tend to be a seedy bunch and it's worse in China. My understanding is that the laws pertaining to this sort of thing have been changed. But it all could have been a myth or based on a single incident.

That's bullshit, and a common urban legend told about everyone. The main reason: the courts in China suck. Rich people get away with murder and everything else. There's an exception made if there's a tragedy that requires a scapegoat, such as poisoned milk killing a bunch of suckling infants. But generally, to a degree much more severe than our own, the Chinese court system is skewed to the rich.

But if the victim is crippled, the driver would have to pay for his living cost, medical cost, etc, for the rest of the victim's life. It's less expensive to finish him off, you can get away as long as it is "not intentional".

This might make sense if the driver had only compensatory damage payments to worry about... but surely deliberate murder counts as a criminal (and I would imagine, capital) offense in China?

I've heard that in China, sometimes richer people drive cars while poorer people ride bicycles. If a car hits a bike rider, the bike rider can sue for damages. Thus, it can be advantageous, and it's allegedly common, for a car driver to accidentally hit a biker, back up, and run him over again to finish him off. I wonder if and when some company (maybe Google, maybe not) will have cars that do this.

Automated expressway driving isn't that hard. If you have lane holding and radar cruise/braking control, both of which have been sold in production vehicles, that's almost enough. Quite a number of groups in both the US and Europe have done it. It's mostly a sensor problem.

More than that, automated driving on an expressway (especially encountering only 67 cars in 3 1/2 hours!) is practically supported in cars that are already in production. Lexus has a reliable lane departure alert that could pretty easily be hooked up to the steering system, and a bunch of manufacturers have collision avoidance systems that activate brakes, as well as adaptive cruise control, etc...

I was thinking about all of these futuristic movies with autonomous cars driving on these California like freeways. In reality if all cars were automated and networked you would only need street level crossings of highways. The cars could weave into the cross traffic at full speed without incident. It might be scary for us old timers but not for long.

The cars could weave into the cross traffic at full speed without incident. It might be scary for us old timers but not for long.

I think such a system would depend on all of the cars' software and hardware (speed/location/distance sensors, etc) working accurately at all times.

All it would take is one robot-jalopy's speedometer or GPS to be off by a few percent to cause a ginormous accident, with fatalities all around.

Therefore I would imagine a system like this would start out scary for us old timers, and quickly become terrifying for everyone involved. Every trip through an intersection would be a high-speed game of Russian roulett

Hello, roboticist here. I'd like to ask you a question: how were power steering, cruise control, anti-lock breaks, fuel injection and collision avoidance radar tested before it was introduced to the commercial car market? When you've answered that question, I'd like to ask you how robotic cars are substantially different in terms of 'experimentation'.

I'm sure the Chinese research team didn't send their robot car out on the public highway without having tested it a lot in the lab and on closed tracks first, and that Google's robot car team didn't, and that the people who developed power steering etc. didn't either. My guess is that none of the DARPA Autonomous Vehicle Challenge competitors did either (or at worst, not many of them:-).

And you don't send a robot car out to drive itself without a human along to override its decisions, any more than a responsible adult would send a young human out to drive unsupervised in a public road for the first time. (Some of us humans learned to drive in "driver's-ed" cars that had an extra set of brakes in the front passenger seat so the instructor could stop the car if he had to, while others learned in cars that didn't have that, so the instructor was limited to yelling a lot and grabbing the steering wheel if needed. And lots of us learned to drive in mostly-empty parking lots before going out on the street.) Presumably the Chinese car had a human backup driver who could override the autopilot if necessary.

It's more fun if you can have the backup driver in the right-hand seat and a large dog or a Terminator mannequin in the left-hand seat, but that's strictly optional.

You don't really understand how cars work, do you? Power steering isn't steer-by-wire; it's just power assist. I've driven cars with broken power steering, and while it was hard to maneuver at slow speeds the difference wasn't really noticeable over 10 mph. If your cruise control locks in the on and maximum speed position, put the car in neutral and brake to a halt, just as you would if the throttle stuck in the fully open position. Antilock brakes prevent the pedal from staying down; they can't bring it do

First of all... there ARE steer-by-wire systems. And they are in much more wide use than robotic cars, of course, but they are allowed on the road.

Also... I understand you've driven cars with inoperative power steering, in other words, you were using probably something close to manual steering with total or near total failure of the power assist systems, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all failures of the power steering system have th

Again, you are showing how you not only do not know what anti lock brakes are but have not driven one in a failed state.

Anti lock brakes RELEASE THE BRAKES when triggered. in other words they run a pump that actually lifts your foot off the brake in a sense (it actually modulates the braking pressure) to pulse the brakes and make the tires stop sliding. guess what, there is a failure mode for Anti Lock that leaves the valve in the bypass and you CANT STOP. I have seen this failure mode many times and th

Is this a reference to the research vehicle sharing the road with unsuspecting motorists? If so, I agree that could be a problem.

On the other hand, those fatal "automobile-travel systems" are fatal when humans are behind the wheel. One factor was cited in the article: reaction times. Human motorists also tend to violate traffic laws at whim and make judgement calls that are contradictory to best practices. That isn't a lack of ethics (as in the case of a machine), it is contrary to ethics.

or a bicycle path or a number of other transportation solutions? why pour more money into a system that has proven to be so destructive, not only to safety, but to the environment and human health?

Because cars work so damned well compared to everything else. Sure, bicycles are safe. They're also slow as hell, can only be practically used by a relatively small portion of the population, suck in bad weather, are terrible when hills are involved, and require a lot of effort to use.

Actually, when we looked at this a few years ago cyclists killed about as many people per passenger mile as motorists. In the UK, anyway, I don't know whether cyclists in other parts of the world are as dangerous as the 'red lights don't apply to me and get off that pedestrian crossing because I'm not stopping' lycra loons over there.

Actually, when we looked at this a few years ago cyclists killed about as many people per passenger mile as motorists. In the UK, anyway, I don't know whether cyclists in other parts of the world are as dangerous as the 'red lights don't apply to me and get off that pedestrian crossing because I'm not stopping' lycra loons over there.

Last time I was current on the statistics, full-time cycle commuting took two years off one's expected lifespan for the chance of accidents -- and added 11 back on for cardiopu

I can tell that you've never commuted on a bicycle. They can be remarkably faster than cars under common traffic conditions, and exceptionally dangerous. (Never forget that a significant amount of engineering is devoted to automobile safety, virtually no consideration is given to bicycle safety.)

There are also hybrid methods of transportation: motorized bicycles are becoming more common, to tackle the hills; transit systems facilitate cyclists on both busses and trains; park-and-ride lots for motorists wh

Planes are also heavily controlled, that is, you need to get permission to take of, fly at a certain altitude, land and so on.Trains are, well, on tracks, not much control there - just forward, stop, reverse. They also are controlled by dispatch, like planes.

Cars have more freedoms of movement than trains but are not controller. There are traffic rules, but not everyone respects them, people forget to turn on (or off) the turning signals, do not let you go first even though the law says you can, drive even

First of all, killed more people then terrorism? Are you from the US government because I'm pretty certain terrorism is a pretty low bar for deaths, On a national scale america had one big one, and next to nothing for almost all of it's history, on a global scale there's probably 15 different illnesses that can surpass terrorism. Secondly we already are risking our lives due to poorly tested and poorly manufactured systems driving our cars. Humans, we give each new human 30 hours in a classroom, 15 minutes

Heres what psychologists have to do before they do an experiment involving humans

This is exactly why the Google car doesn't ask other drivers about their feelings while stopped at lights. The psychologists said it wasn't ethical.

Other than that, the driverless car has as much right to be on the road as any young learner driver just starting out. And how else would this technology ever get tested under real world conditions, because requiring informed consent from all the other drivers is obviously impractical.

I share the road with unpredictable humans every day. Sharing the road with a predictable computer should be no challenge. Some people worry to much. Computers never worry. I think I prefer the computer over you.

As a motorcycle rider. I would prefer a highway FULL of robot vehicles than the hand-full of complete idiots on the highway I see each morning that almost run people off the road. This morning I watched a complete idiot pass on the shoulder at 80+mph with his expedition XL because he did not want to wait for the traffic back up. the number of bend over reflector posts behind him made me grin wide knowing that his precious canyonero is now demolished in the front.

It's a stretch to call experimenting with driver-less cars on public roads experimenting on people. Any experiment that could affect the lives of others could fall under such a loose meaning. Does experimentation on viruses require the consent of everyone on the planet because they could possibly be affected if things go wrong? Should we have not ever attempted to launch anything into space without the unanimous consent of the planet? Do you think all drivers on the road should have to consent before al

Google's driverless car was just in the news for crashing into a Prius

A human was driving the vehicle.

Last I heard google has not commented on the accident. IIRC the car always has a driver but it is not clear that the driver was actively at the controls. Much as aircraft always have a pilot even when taking off, cruising or landing on autopilot.

A Google spokesperson gave us this quote about the accident: "Safety is our top priority. One of our goals is to prevent fender-benders like this one, which occurred while a person was manually driving the car."

When we do let you know that they've done that, you'll complain that it's old news and that they were driving on expressways ages ago and this is just a small step in the technology and doesn't warrant a/. article.

LOL.... I got my masters in engineering from USC about 10 years back... I looked around the room and typically I was the only blond person there. I'd estimate that 75% of the people were of asian decent (Indian, and various asian countries). They're not coming to steal the research, they're coming to do the research!

It's pretty well known that China has been sending spies disguised as academic scholars/PhD students to appropriate information on research projects conducted in the US

That's just regular academic behaviour. The whole point of sending students to study abroad is so that the student picks up skill and techniques which can brought back home with them. It also promotes the exchange of ideas. This is how academia works.

As for the spies, most of those just bribe western company executives to get what they want.

In many cases yes, it is. If you request it. Depends on the research, your relationship with the researcher and so on.

There are probably 40-50 graduate students from Chicom where I am, (In ontario Canada) and we have about 120 grad students... Just in computer science. Google can take the best and brightest all it wants, it doesn't get them all, a lot of them are chinese and will work on similar projects from the same starting points.

Building a driverless car is not a radical departure or great leap in t

Well, if you are actually interested in the science, the research this car is based on can be easily found, I think, using google. Here, read this article (exhibited at the 2008 IEEE computational intelligence conference hosted in Hong Kong), and if you comprehend it, you can implement their procedure yourself: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4634099&tag=1 [ieee.org]